But he was not Matthew. He was everything that Matthew was not. He was safety and comfort and warmth. He was home. He was everything in the world that was hope and sunshine. He took a step toward her and opened his arms to her, and she was in those arms without ever knowing how the distance between them had closed.
Mary BaloghTags: love-is
Why have you done all this for me?" She turned her head to look at him. "Tell me the truth."
He shook his head slowly.
"I don't think I could have been more terrified of the devil than I was of you," she said, "when it was happening and in my thoughts and nightmares afterward. And when you came home to Willoughby and I realized that the Duke of Ridgeway was you, I thought I would die from the horror of it."
His face was expressionless. "I know," he said.
"I was afraid of your hands more than anything," she said. "They are beautiful hands."
He said nothing.
"When did it all change?" she asked. She turned completely toward him and closed the distance between them. "You will not say the words yourself. But they are the same words as the ones on my lips, aren't they?"
She watched him swallow.
"For the rest of my life I will regret saying them," she said. "But I believe I would regret far more not saying them."
"Fleur," he said, and reached out a staying hand.
"I love you," she said.
"No."
"I love you."
"It is just that we have spent a few days together," he said, "and talked a great deal and got to know each other. It is just that I have been able to help you a little and you are feeling grateful to me."
"I love you," she said.
"Fleur."
She reached up to touch his scar. "I am glad I did not know you before this happened," she said. "I do not believe I would have been able to stand the pain."
"Fleur," he said, taking her wrist in his hand.
"Are you crying?" she said. She lifted both arms and wrapped them about his neck and laid her cheek against his shoulder. "Don't, my love. I did not mean to lay a burden on you. I don't mean to do so. I only want you to know that you are loved and always will be."
"Fleur," he said, his voice husky from his tears, "I have nothing to offer you, my love. I have nothing to give you. My loyalty is given elsewhere. I didn't want this to happen. I don't want it to happen. You will meet someone else. When I am gone you will forget and you will be happy."
She lifted her head and looked into his face. She wiped away one of his tears with one finger. "I am not asking anything in return," she said. "I just want to give you something, Adam. A free gift. My love. Not a burden, but a gift. To take with you when you go, even though we will never see each other again."
He framed her face with his hands and gazed down into it. "I so very nearly did not recognize you," he said. "You were so wretchedly thin, Fleur, and pale. Your lips were dry and cracked, your hair dull and lifeless. But I did know you for all that. I think I would still be in London searching for you if you had not gone to that agency. But it's too late, love. Six years too late.
Tags: declarations-of-love
Fear is a powerful beast, if it is allowed the mastery.
Mary BaloghHe offered his arm and she took it. And the world was the same place.
And forever different.
That is the excitement of life," he said when he was finished. "The not knowing. It is often best not to know.
Mary BaloghPeople, especially some religious people. would have us believe that it is wrong . even a sin, to love oneself. It is not. It is the basic, essential love. If you do not love yourself, you cannot possibly love anyone else. Not fully and truly.
Mary BaloghYou will find that wanting, even loving, is not enough.
Mary BaloghThere is no such place as the promised land, but it would be foolish to reject even an unpromised land as worthless without first inspecting it thoroughly.
Mary BaloghLife so often becomes a determined, relentless avoidance of pain - of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain has to be acknowledged and even touched so that one can move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it.
Mary BaloghBy the time she had finished, her hand was in Elizabeth's firm clasp again. Her touch was strangely comforting—a woman's touch signifying a woman's sympathy. Elizabeth would understand what it would be like to be a captive, to have one's freedom taken away, and then, as a final indignity, to have one's very body invaded and used for the pleasure of one's captor. Another woman would understand the monumental inner battle that had
had to be waged every single day and night to cling to that something at the core of herself that was herself, that gave her identity and dignity. That something that even a rapist—even, perhaps, a murderer—could not take away from her.
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